C.I.A. Leader Will Face Crucial Gaps In Iran Data

By SCOTT SHANE; Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article.

Published: May 7, 2006

As the Central Intelligence Agency undergoes its latest round of turmoil, legislators and former intelligence officials say that serious gaps in the United States' knowledge of Iran are among the most critical problems facing a new director of the spy agency.

A year after a presidential commission gave a scathing assessment of intelligence on Iran, they say, American spy agencies remain severely handicapped in their efforts to assess its weapons programs and its leaders' intentions. Whoever takes the helm of the C.I.A., after the resignation on Friday of Porter J. Goss, will confront a crucial target with few, if any, American spies on the ground, sketchy communications intercepts and ambiguous satellite images, the experts say.

When Mr. Goss took the job 19 months ago, part of his mandate was to make certain that the wildly mistaken prewar assessments about Iraq's weapons would not repeated. But as Mr. Goss leaves the agency, intelligence watchers say huge uncertainty remains in estimates of Iran's weapons, complicating the task of persuading the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions or take other measures.

''How many years are they away from having a nuclear weapon?'' asked Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, in an interview this week. ''We don't know, and the people providing the answers don't know.''

Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said a classified briefing in early March on Iran's missiles and their ability to carry warheads ''raised as many questions as it answered.'' She and other representatives sent a classified letter posing additional questions on March 9 to John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, but they have received no reply, she said.

Some experts say they have confidence in official American estimates that Iran is unlikely to have a nuclear weapon until the next decade. But an array of former intelligence officials have doubts about that estimation.

''Whenever the C.I.A. says 5 to 10 years, that means they don't know,'' said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iran specialist in the clandestine service of the C.I.A. He said French and Israeli experts believe that an Iranian bomb may be as little as one to three years away.

Jon Wolfsthal of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said American uncertainty extends to the relationship of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand president since August, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, and their respective goals.

''We not only don't know who makes the decisions,'' said Mr. Wolfsthal, who traveled to Iran last month, ''we don't even know who's in the room when decisions are made.''

A senior American intelligence official, authorized to speak only on condition of anonymity, did not argue that assessment. ''It is a hard target, but we are not complacent,'' the official said. ''On a daily basis we're trying to recruit new sources.''

Such intelligence shortcomings date at least to the period before the Islamist revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979. With no American embassy in Tehran, C.I.A. officers cannot operate under diplomatic cover inside Iran. Because American sanctions ban most business and academic ties, infiltrating spies under what is known as nonofficial cover is difficult.

C.I.A. officers based in Frankfurt managed to build a network of agents inside Iran. But Iranian counterintelligence broke up the ring in 1989, former intelligence officers say. The Frankfurt base was disbanded in the early 1990's, and operations have since been directed from C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., focusing on areas where there are large numbers of Iranian immigrants, including Los Angeles.

The National Security Agency's efforts to intercept Iranian government communications were hampered in the last two years because Iran learned that the United States had broken its codes and then changed them. Satellite photography has provided detailed images of suspected nuclear facilities, but such photographs leave many unanswered questions, officials said.